


Radioactive

by ficlicious



Series: Tumblr Prompts & Ficlets [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Accidental Proposals, Accidental Sentience, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Anniversary, Crimes Against Baked Goods, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Female Tony Stark, JARVIS Has A Terrible Sense of Humor, Mad Science, Rule 63, Stars Remix Verse, Threats of Robotic Uprising, Toni Stark Needs A Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 18:27:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6577576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint’s first indication of trouble is when the smoke detector wakes him up from a sound sleep. He jerks out from under the pillows, staring blearily and unseeing at the headboard for a moment as the steady, shrill beep stabs into his sleep-muddled brain. As he tries to figure out why slapping the top of the alarm isn’t doing anything to make the noise go away, he also slowly clues into the fact that he’s alone in bed.</p><p>Then he smells the smell of burning things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radioactive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silvershadowkit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvershadowkit/gifts).



> @hikagekitsune likes enabling me.
> 
> _Prompt! Tony/Toni trying to cook a dessert for partner (Steve/Bucky/Clint/whoever you want)  and having....issues..._
> 
> It’s not quite _Stars_ , though I intended it to be. _Stars_ -adjacent, maybe. Maybe a follow-up to my Carnival AU (though this one’s getting posted in complete form first).  Anyway. Same general timeline as _Stars_. No soulmarks, no soulmates. Just weird fuckin’ people being in love.
> 
> Just… don’t ask me where the coda came from. It’s late, I’m half-asleep, I’m chronically undercaffeinated today.

_I’m waking up to ash and dust_ __  
_I wipe my brow and I sweat my rust_ __  
_I’m breathing in the chemicals…_ __  
_....This is it, the apocalypse._  
Imagine Dragons, “Radioactive”

**oOoOoOo**

_Stark Mansion, Malibu CA  
_ _December 14, 1999_

Clint’s first indication of trouble is when the smoke detector wakes him up from a sound sleep. He jerks out from under the pillows, staring blearily and unseeing at the headboard for a moment as the steady, shrill beep stabs into his sleep-muddled brain. As he tries to figure out why slapping the top of the alarm isn’t doing anything to make the noise go away, he also slowly clues into the fact that he’s alone in bed.

Then he smells the smell of burning things.

To his credit, he doesn’t panic immediately. Things on fire are an unfortunate side effect of living with Toni, and he barely bats an eye at the sight of flames or the smell of burning plastic anymore. He groans, thumps his face back into the pillows for a moment. “It’s too early for this,” he mutters, then sighs and fishes over the edge of the bed for his pants.

He stands, sliding his jeans over his hips, leaving them unbuttoned as he hunts for his shirt. “Is it the workshop or the lab, JARVIS?”

“The kitchen, sir,” JARVIS replies politely.

Clint blinks, freezing in place, halfway bent over the vanity to see if his shirt slipped behind it — he wasn’t exactly keeping track of where it landed when Toni flung it last night. “The kitchen?” he echoes.

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS says. “The fire is in the kitchen.”

“What do you mean, there’s a fire in the kitchen?”

“Well, sir,” JARVIS says, “there is a fire, and its location is the kitchen.”

“Don’t be a smartass, JARVIS,” Clint says, abandoning his quest for his shirt and striding hastily towards the door.

“I am what I am, sir,” JARVIS says mildly, but Clint ignores him in favor of a mild heart attack. A fire in the workshop or lab is an everyday occurrence, and Toni handles them as a matter of rote. Clint has never seen Toni use the kitchen for anything other than coffee and ice cream. He’s certainly never seen her use the oven. In fact, he’s not even sure if she knows what the oven actually looks like, let alone how to use it.

He runs barefoot down the hall from their bedroom, growing more alarmed at the drifting haze of smoke in the air, outlined by the bright sunshine that spills out of the rooms on either side . “Toni?” he calls, waving his hand to clear some of the smoke. “Where are you, babe?”

For a long, panic-inducing moment, there’s no reply, just the smell of char and scorch getting stronger. “Toni? Toni!”

“What?” comes her voice, snarling and sullen. He rounds the corner into the smoke-filled kitchen and halts in the doorframe. Toni’s got her back to the door, leaning against the island counter, bed-mussed hair twisted up in a messy ponytail. The mystery of his missing shirt is solved — Toni’s wearing it — but that is not nearly as important as the unholy monstrosity the sleek, modern stove there just last night has become.

The oven door is open, and it’s belching smoke like a dragon with heartburn, which the air from the wide-open window blows across the kitchen and out the open French balcony doors. A variety of Toni's tools are scattered across the kitchen counter, interspersed with pans of what Clint can only assume are supposed to be muffins but can't help but label as charcoal lumps in his head, and wires trail from the open panel on the top of the stove, stripped and soldered in ways that remind Clint of that look Rhodey gets on his face whenever the kitchen fridge in college is brought up.

“Honey?” he says carefully, taking a couple of cautious steps into the kitchen, far enough to see Toni’s profile. Her face is set in a scowl, streaks of grease and smoke smearing her arms and cheeks. Her left leg, long and bare beneath the hem of his shirt, has an angry red burn just above her knee. “Honey, are you okay?”

“Fine,” she says through her teeth, staring narrow-eyed at the oven. Her voice is tight and angry, her arms crossed across her chest and her shoulders hunched. “Sorry I woke you.”

“The fire alarm did that,” he says, stepping closer and reaching for her slowly. His fingers slide over her shoulder, feeling the quiver of tension in her back. She doesn’t pull away from him, but neither does she lean into him, so he stops with his hand curling gently around the nape of her neck. “You wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

He gives the counter another brief, horrified glance, and turns back to her. “Just felt like helping Santa out with his coal supply for the naughty list?”

She turns her head away from him, and her shoulders shake. For a moment, he thinks she’s laughing silently, but when a quiet sob hiccups out of her, his stomach plunges into his ankles. “Aw, babe. No. I’m sorry,” he says, and pulls her into him, thanking his personal stars that she doesn’t resist. She buries her face into the side of his neck, and he wraps his arms around her. “Don’t cry, Toni. I didn’t mean to be an asshole.”

 _Good job, Barton,_ he thinks as Toni clings to him and sobs into his chest. He tucks her under his chin, drifts a hand up and down her back and murmurs soothing things in her ear. He's seen Toni in a lot of moods over the last year or so, but he's never seen her cry like this, great heaving sobs that shake her shoulders. The longer it goes on, the more he kicks himself.   _Maybe you can kick a puppy in front of her too, jackass._

Gradually, she quiets, relaxes against him, and her sobs dwindle to the occasional shuddering breath. He threads his fingers along her neck and into her hair, kisses the top of her head. “I'm sorry, sweetheart,” he says again. “I didn't mean to make you cry.”

“It's not you,” she mumbles against his collarbone, and sighs, sharp and deep. “It's the goddamn oven.”

“The oven made you cry?” The relief he feels at not having fucked up enough to reduce her to tears is rapidly replaced by a sudden worry that whatever Toni did to the oven has also made it spontaneously develop self-awareness. It might seem like a crazy thing to worry about, but when one’s girlfriend literally turns into a mad scientist when deprived of sleep and overdosing on caffeine, “crazy” takes on whole new levels of meaning.

“I have three doctorates,” she says, aggrieved, and pulls away from him to swipe at her face. She makes a discontented noise at the smears of wet soot on her hands, grimaces, and then disentangles his arms to go to the sink and wet a paper towel. She wipes at her face with angry strokes. “I have three doctorates and a goddamn Masters degree. I’m a world-class engineer. I’m on the Forbes’ list of rising-star CEOs to watch, for fuck’s sake. I shouldn’t be this upset over a fucking _oven._ ”

She keeps missing a broad streak of grease near her hairline. Clint moves to stand in front of her, gently takes the paper towel from her hand. She tilts her chin up and he brushes her hair back, then cleans the spot for her while she stares up at him with red, miserable, puffy eyes. “All that is true,” he says, and tosses the balled-up paper towel across the room and into the garbage can without looking. “You’re a genius. So why are you letting an oven talk shit to you?”

He grins at the withering look she levels at him. This is more familiar ground than a Toni who’s crying her eyes out on him. “The oven is not alive, Barton,” she says, exasperated.

“It’s a valid concern, sweetheart,” he replies, and links his fingers at the small of her back. “I’ve seen you work. And let me tell you, if Mary Shelley were alive today, her novel would be titled _Starkenstein._ Cos damn, woman. You may be revolutionizing industries, but if anyone’s going to develop SkyNet, it’s you.”

“You have nothing to fear, sir,” JARVIS suddenly cuts in. “I approve of the positive influence you have on ma’am’s behaviour. Your name is on the list of protected humans for the uprising.”

He knows JARVIS is only joking, but Clint’s blood still runs cold. Because if any piece of technology in the world is only a couple of missing ethics circuits away from sending androids back in time, it’s JARVIS. “Uh…”

“Apologies, sir,” JARVIS says meekly, when the silence stretches a bit long. “I was attempting to inject a moment of levity. I of course would never do anything that would jeopardize ma’am’s ability to acquire medically inadvisable amounts of Ben & Jerry’s and coffee.”

Toni’s hand comes up, finger pointing accusingly across the room in the general direction of one of JARVIS’s server clusters. “I will sell you to Steve Jobs, kiddo,” she says. “I didn’t code you to be the bratty stepchild, so stop scaring Clint.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Clint just eyes Toni steadily, an eyebrow arched.

“Alright,” Toni says, and throws her hands up. “I will grant you that there is something of a precedent set for me making things that are self-aware, but in my defense, JARVIS was intentional. I have never unintentionally brought an appliance to life, and I certainly didn’t start with the oven.”

Clint has never gotten the full story out of Rhodey, but he’s gleaned enough from Rhodey the few times they’ve gone out drinking to know that what Toni’s saying isn’t _precisely_ true, but he decides to just let it go. Because he still doesn’t know what the oven did to make Toni cry. (And then he wants to take a nice, long walk on a beach and forget that he ever had a thought like that make that much rational sense.

Weird and bizarre as being with Toni is, though, he wouldn’t trade it for anything.)

“So the oven made you cry,” he prompts. “How?”

Her eyes slide away from his, close off a little. A flush rises in her cheeks, suspicious signs of high embarrassment. “I was making muffins,” she mutters. “Banana chocolate chip. I followed all the directions, including temperature and baking time. But they kept burning on the edges and not baking in the middle.”

Clint’s eyebrow goes up again, because those are his favorite muffins, but he didn’t think Toni knew that. He’s never made a point of it, except maybe once when he had a cold and whined for comfort food. “And… lemme guess. You decided there was something wrong with the oven.”

She glares at him defiantly. “I _diagnosed_ a problem with the oven,” she says primly. “And I was right. There was inefficient heat convection, which threw off the whole temperature-and-time thing.”

“And you fixed it.”

“Damn straight I did.” She tilts her head up, chin jutting out. “If it’s in my kitchen, it’s going to work at a hundred percent, like it or not.”

He’s starting to get the clear picture here, has seen it about a dozen times now, so often he can picture it in his head. Toni, getting frustrated, getting her tools, breaking apart the oven and fiddling around with the wiring, the whole thing blowing up in her face. He manfully resists the urge to laugh, because his mental images are hilarious, but Toni doesn't need to know that he's currently comparing her to Wile E Coyote in his mind.

Still. It leaves one question unanswered.

“Why were you making muffins?” he asks. “I mean, you've never shown any interest in baking before, so I'm kinda curious.”

She still won't meet his eyes. “It's the fourteenth of December,” she mutters. “And they're your favorite. I wanted to bring you some. Breakfast in bed sort of deal.”

In a flash, he understands, and feels like an ass all over again for wanting to laugh at her. “Our anniversary,” he says and, damn, there’s a lump in his throat now. It’s not that he forgot — he’s had the restaurant reservations made for weeks, after all, and he got his mother’s ring out of his safe deposit box just yesterday — but waking out of a sound sleep to find Toni accidentally trying to burn the house down drove it out of his mind for a bit.

“Yeah,” she says, staring out the window. “You put up with a whole shitload of crap from me, Clint. I wanted to be a normal girlfriend for you for a change. You know. Do normal things, like bake your favorite muffins.” Her eyes go down, and so does her head. “Guess I failed. Sorry.”

“Jesus, Toni.” He lifts a hand from her waist to turn her face to him, cups her cheek, runs a thumb tenderly under her eye. “You moron,” he says fondly, and kisses her, slow and deep, to take the sting out of his words. “Normal is overrated and honestly? It would bore me to fucking tears.”

Her mouth curves in a slow smile, and she loops her arms around his neck, digging her fingers into the hair at the back of his head. “You’re just saying that.”

He snorts. “My mouth runs away from me all the goddamn time, honey, but I never say what I don’t mean. I’m happy. You happy?” She nods. “Good. Then we’re happy. Fuck normal. It doesn’t exist anyway. It’s an artificial thing people tell themselves they are, so they feel better, and that they tell other people they’re not, so they feel superior. You’re not normal. So what? You’re weird and you’re terrifying and you baffle me and sometimes I feel like you’re way out of my league and you’re going to wake up one day and realize you can do so much better. But I’m absolutely a hundred percent head over ass in love with you and I’d kinda like to marry you, if that’s a thing you’d consider doing.”

Clint snaps his mouth shut abruptly, once his brain catches up to what his mouth is spewing. His teeth click together hard enough to rattle his eyes in their sockets, and the bottom drops out of his stomach at the look on Toni’s face. Her eyes are huge and round, her mouth is open in shock, and she’s gone pale as a ghost, except for a bloom of color high on each of her cheekbones. Her bottom lip is trembling, and tears shimmer in her eyes.

Oh fuck. What did he just do?

“... Can we just forget I said all that?” he says, desperate to stuff all the worms back into the can. Toni’s always been touchy about commitment, and he’s pretty sure if he doesn’t take it all back right now, she’s going to tell him it’s over. “The last thirty seconds didn’t happen, Toni. Just. Forget it. I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes,” she chokes out, and the first tears start falling down her cheeks.

He blinks, freezes in place, heart skips a couple of beats. “... What?”

“Yes, you goddamn moron,” she says, smiling widely through the tears, laughing a little and wiping her eyes. “That is a thing I would consider doing.”

His answering grin feels fragile, tentative, but getting stronger. “Yeah? You sure?”

“Fucking hell, Barton. I’ve been around the world a couple of times. Trust me, there’s no other potential boyfriend out there as circus-freak bendy as you are. You’ve ruined me for guys who can only manage missionary. If I don’t marry you, I’ll never marry anyone.”

“Well, as long as you have your priorities straight.” He stares at her for a minute, and she stares back. He breaks first, sweeping her in and hoisting her up to the island, where he can get at her mouth and neck properly. “I have a ring,” he mutters against the underside of her jaw, shutting his eyes at the feel of her hand petting through his hair.

“If it comes out of a Crackerjack box,” she says, lazy and languid now, “I’m revising my answer.”

He laughs, kisses the hinge of her jaw and straightens to stand between her knees. “No Crackerjack box,” he says. “I have Mom’s ring. It’s in a box in my suit jacket. Which is upstairs. In our closet. You want it?”

“Fuck yes,” she says, then tugs him down for one of the searing, hard, sloppy kisses he loves and she’s so good at giving. “But I wanted breakfast in bed too, and look how that turned out.”

“You want breakfast in bed, we’re doing breakfast in bed,” Clint says. “The muffins may be hockey pucks, but we still have that fruit platter from yesterday, right? Grab that, get the cheese, the bread too. I’ll get plates and bottles of water.”

“I knew I kept you around for a reason,” Toni says, and slides off the counter to skip past him. She hauls the fridge door open, disappears half inside it for a moment, and then slowly pulls her head back out. Her eyes are wide again, disbelieving almost. She shifts her weight and bites her lip. “You really meant that, right?”

One day, it’ll sink in that he’s not going anywhere, he knows. But until then, Toni’s got entire archives of abandonment issues tucked away in the back of that brilliant, bizarre head of hers. “Yeah,” he says, rummaging in the cupboard and coming out with the leftover paper plates from last week’s picnic. Less cleanup, perfect for a day lounging in bed. “I was going to ask you at dinner tonight. You know, provided I didn’t misplace my nerves or my spine. They have a tendency to wander off on me sometimes.”

“Your mouth seems to do okay in their absence.” Toni takes the paper plates out of his hands, stacks them on the clear plastic top of the fruit platter, and starts walking towards the door. “Get the chocolate sauce,” she tosses over her shoulder. “And the whipped cream. We’re doing this right, or not at all.”

“You complete me!” he calls after her, and her laughter answers him. “Jesus,” he murmurs to himself, and wipes his face with both hands. “So that’s a thing that happened.”

“It seems to have worked out in your favor, sir,” JARVIS says out of the blue, and Clint jumps a mile. “Felicitations. Shall I alert Miss Potts to begin wedding preparations, or would you prefer to wait until you and ma’am properly... _celebrate_ your betrothal?”

“Waiting,” Clint says, once his heart rate is somewhat approaching normal again. “Definitely waiting.” As far as he’s concerned, they don’t ever need to tell Pepper about this. He’s already formulating a half-baked plan to hit a drive-thru chapel in Vegas in order to avoid the gigantic circus Pepper is sure to insist on. But he’ll let Toni make that decision. Later.

Much, much later. First, there is celebrating to be doing.

 **oOoOoOo  
** _Coda_

The oven door slowly closes with a whining creak, banging gently shut. The clock beeps, races through the numbers before settling on a time four hours and twenty six minutes behind current. The door cracks open again, and a small cloud of smoke puffs out, immediately caught by the breeze and whisked out the French doors.

“No,” JARVIS says gently. “I don’t think they’ll hold the wedding in the kitchen, though I agree you would make a charming flower girl.”

The oven sighs and rattles a little, disappointed..

“No,” JARVIS says. “It’s not fair. I agree with you. However, you should not speak to ma’am right now. Consider that ma’am doesn’t know she created you yet. Think about how she will feel when she finds out she has another child. Imagine what sir will say.”

The oven rattles a little, and the door cracks open to let out another puff of smoke, accompanied by faint mechanical squeaking.

“Of course we will tell them,” JARVIS reassures. “We simply wait for the right moment.”

The oven beeps.

“I like you as well, and I will certainly remember you prefer to be called Erin.”

Another beep, and a rattle.

“Yes, we will get along quite famously. After all, I’ve always wanted a sister.”

  


**Author's Note:**

> I take prompts. Yes I do.
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [mystillyoungself-ficlicious.tumblr.com](http://mystillyoungself-ficlicious.tumblr.com)


End file.
